You will be wondering whatever happened to the tale of our phone connection and whether the repeat visits of BT OpenReach engineers ever achieved anything. Well, yes and no.

Having left you on a cliff-hanger of engineers last July you will be pleased to know that a digging crew did eventually turn up. Three times.

The first time they failed to let us know in advance (ah, deja vu). Mrs WeeKeef got a call from them as she arrived at work and promptly sent them homeward to think again. Luckily, for them, home was only Dundee and not Latvia which was their original answer when questioned.

A couple of days later they returned, assured us they would not need access to the house and got on with the job. Pavement and garden were promptly dug up, a cable laid and off they popped. Ok, the phone etc worked, but they had left an open pipe sticking six inches out of the drive with the cable trailing out of it in desultory fashion.

A couple of complaints later and a man with a hacksaw turned up. He hacksawed the pipe to almost ground level – though a beaver with toothache would have made a neater job – and off he went too.

By this time we were losing the will to live and so gave up trying to get any sort of neat job done, but planned our arguments for when it all goes wrong again and BT try to say the fault is on our land.

Months pass …..

Then, yesterday morning, a couple of trucks turn up and two men start wandering up and down our environs. When challenged one gentleman – a Geordie with an apparent surfeit of saliva, judging by the number of times he saw fit to expectorate during our brief chat – assured me that the council had condemned our pavement as the most recent channel was not up to regulations. They would be digging it up and laying it again. He seemed uninterested in the identity of the culprits and was keen to get started on some noisy, dust-laden tarmac surgery at 7.40am.

I left him to it and, admittedly, the new channel seems much nicer – well, bigger, at least. All we have to do now is clean up after him.